My wife’s from Zhejiang province, and so is this can of pickled cabbage that she bought yesterday. I like the label a lot. It’s not quite Engrish: of course, we would say “people’s mess hall”, but the Chinese characters actually denote an extremely basic canteen-like eatery. A mess hall, a canteen, maybe a refectory; very…

I once wrote about a miniature køkkenmødding shell midden that accreted in our kitchen sink when we had oysters (image below). Another type of archaeological assemblage that occurs far more commonly in our house is the chicken or pork bone dump. The chicken bones usually don’t look very archaeological when we throw them out since…

Dismember a chicken and boil it in pan #1 until tender. Boil it with onion + carrot + garlic clove, all split, and bay leaf + salt. In pan #2, melt a few tablespoons of butter and whisk 0.4 dl of wheat flour into it. Add 5 dl of the chicken broth from pan #1,…

At my wife’s suggestion, I quit work 1½ hour early today and cycled with her and the kids into the woods to pick mushrooms. Lovely sunny afternoon, and I can report that the hills between Lakes Lundsjön and Trehörningen are rich in boletes right now. Here are the species we got: King bolete, Stensopp/Karl Johan,…

And here’s star philologist and religion scholar Ola Wikander with a guest lesson in Akkadian. The word of the day is nuḫatimmu. It means “a cook” in Akkadian (or sometimes “a baker”). Maybe something to interest Gordon Ramsay? And wouldn’t it be great if there was an Akkadian version of the TV show MasterChef, named…

Christian fundamentalists like to believe that homosexuality is an illness that can — and should — be cured. The factual belief is contradicted by a solid scientific consensus, and the value judgement is widely considered to be a repressive holdover from the Bronze Age. The makers of the French orange-based soft drink Orangina seem to…